Intellectual Virtue: The Contributions of Newberry Award Winning Books, 2000-2010

Abstract

In 1988, John Michael Atherton observed: "The virtues have fallen out of favor in curricular theory on and practice in moral education" (Atherton, 1988, p. 299.) Over the past quarter century, however, there has been a dramatic change in how virtue is regarded. Education writers and philosophers, social commentators and politicians, have all helped to create a vast, new literature on virtue and the related concept "character." Further, an historical mission of schools-to promote the development of "good character" among youth-has been restored, at least in theory, through legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates character education. Today, "character" is strongly associated with what are regarded as distinctly moral virtues. Often overlooked is the fact that Aristotle was concerned with the development of both moral and intellectual virtues. This is a serious oversight, both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, for Aristotle and the ancient Greeks more broadly, there was not a bright dividing line between moral and non-or amoral phenomena; moral and intellectual virtues inform one another to influence all sorts of conduct, some of which we moderns would regard as belonging to the "moral" sphere and some not. And practically, human flourishing-the raison d'être for virtues-requires both qualities. The central aim of this essay is to illuminate some of the contributions of Newbery Award winning books published from 2000 through 2010 to the development of intellectual virtue. The Newbery Award is named for the 18th-century English book

Virtues in Competency-Based Assessment Frameworks: A Text Analysis

“…We labelled them as professional virtues because these virtues resemble qualities deemed laudable in the profession and practice of the ENT surgeon. See Table 1 for more information about these virtue categories which are based on literature [9,38,39]. Although such categorization is also widely debated, these four categories served the purpose of providing an insightful overview.…”

“…Virtues that enable acquisition of knowledge and to understand truth (sometimes also labelled as epistemic virtues) [9,38,39].…”